Greg Hinz On Politics

Unions blast Illinois chamber over workers' comp report

The state's leading organized-labor group is ripping into the Illinois Chamber of Commerce over charges it made earlier this week about alleged flaws in the workers' compensation system.

In a statement, Illinois AFL-CIO President Michael Carrigan termed the chamber report "nothing more than another shot" in a long campaign to "dismantle a program built to assure that workers maimed or injured receive fair compensation."

The chamber report "misrepresents the facts" and amounts to a "public relations stunt we have grown so familiar with from the chamber," added Mr. Carrigan, who was joined in his statement by Stephen Phillips, president of the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association.

In its report, the chamber actually went not after unions per se but the judiciary, saying in so many words that appellate and state Supreme Court justices have rewritten big chunks of legal precedents to the disadvantage of business, leaving the state with the fourth-highest workers' comp premium charges of all 50 states. As a result, it contends, few benefits have been derived from workers' comp reforms enacted two yeas ago after a compromise between labor and management.

The chamber is wrong, Mr. Carrigan says in his report.

The court cases cited by the chamber predate 2011 and, thus, the latest reforms, he says. They involve just a tiny fraction of the workers' comp cases that come before the courts, amounting to "cherry picking." And if workers' comp premiums haven't dropped, insurance companies must be fattening their profits, he concludes.

But Chamber CEO Doug Whitley isn't backing off.

It will be years until the courts deal with the 2011 changes, but their "most troubling" rulings cited in the chamber's report are law and are affecting companies now.

I'm not in a position to declare a winner here. But let's just say that, if Mr. Whitley's goal was to drive the unions to the bargaining table to make further reforms, a bit of a cooling-off period might be in order.

Interestingly, the state Supreme Court, through its spokesman, declined to comment.